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Roads, Mobility, and Violence in Indigenous Literature and Art from North America explores mobility, spatialized violence, and geographies of activism in a diverse archive of literary and visual art by Indigenous authors and artists. Building on Raymond Williams’s observation that “traffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form of social relations,” this book pulls into focus racial, sexual, and environmental violence localized around roads. Reading this archive of texts next to lived struggles over spatial justice, Rymhs argues that roads are spaces of complex signification. For many Indigenous communities, the road has not often been so open. Recent Indigenous writing and visual art explores this tension between mobility and confinement. Drawing primarily on the work of Marie Clements, Tomson Highway, Marilyn Dumont, Leanne Simpson, Richard Van Camp, Kent Monkman, and Louise Erdrich, this volume examines histories of uprooting and violence associated with roads. Along with exploring these fraught histories of mobility, the book emphasizes various ways in which Indigenous communities have transformed roads into sites of political resistance and social memory.

Offering close readings of novels by Sherman Alexie to Leslie Marmon Silko, this book documents the reinvention of Anglo-European nationality in the interests of sustaining the indigenous traditions that long-preceded colonization.

North of the Color Lineexamines life in Canada for the estimated 5,000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era.By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the firsthand accounts of former sleeping car porters, Mathieu shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism.Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, Mathieu historicizes Canadian racial attitudes, and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there.

An insightful analysis of how art was used to create an independent Canadian national identity, often at the expense of First Nations representation.

In Pictographs, Ojibway artist James Simon Mishibinijima brings to life the legends passed down to him by generations of Elders. In this collection, each image tells a story, silently communicating lessons of harmony, interconnectedness and peace.

This essay seeks to recover the ordinary and its analytical and decolonial potential within the extraordinary conditions created by settler colonialism. To do so, it investigates moments when Mohawks at Akwesasne, a community that straddles the US–Canada border, refused to acknowledge settler authority, paying particular attention to the relationship between their refusals and the condition of ordinary life. This article also considers the historical challenge of how to preserve moments of experience and their complex meanings without enveloping them in broader narratives dominated, in this case, by questions of sovereignty. How do theories of sovereignty affect the production of history, and what constraints do they place on our ability to narrate Indigenous experiences? What if we cast away the two narratives that dominate tellings of Indigenous histories: that of a settler crisis over control and that of an age-old struggle for sovereignty? Is it possible, or useful, to differentiate between acts focused primarily on maintaining the contours of ordinary, everyday life—expressions of lateral agency less about the \"long haul\" than about the here-and-now—and deliberate acts of political engagement, consciously aimed at the structural inequality undergirding a particular situation? Through a deep historical treatment of several moments within Akwesasne's early twentieth-century history, this essay proposes and attempts to execute a methodology that draws together multiple theories of affect and sovereignty.

This article offers a case study of a transracial adoption involving a mixed-heritage child and a legally Indian adoptive couple. The legal adoption of “Frances T” in 1937, considered to be “in the best interests of the child” by social welfare professionals, took on gendered and racialized meaning in the discourse of the Indian Affairs bureaucrats who subsequently attempted to overturn it. The article uses the case to examine Canadian settler-colonial beliefs about blood and belonging. It also explores the complications that emerged as legally defined Indian people came into contact with provincial child welfare legislation. With the goal of eliminating Indigenous legal and kinship forms, the Indian Act colonized adoption so it could be used as a method of assimilation rather than as a traditional form of Indigenous alliance creation and childcare. The case highlights the themes of Indigenous kinship and sovereignty, legislated Indian identity, and the growing involvement of social workers in the lives of Aboriginal people in the mid- to late-twentieth century.

iiiPunjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan, has witnessed multiple nomadic, mendicant, trading and pastoral mobilities for centuries. Imperial assisted mobilities in the nineteenth century produced a category of hypermobile Sikhs, who left their villages in Punjab to seek their fortunes in Southeast Asia, Africa, Australia, America and Canada. The practices of the British, British Indian and the Canadian governments to obstruct free flows of Sikhs offer telling instances of the exercise of governmentality through which both old imperialism and the new Empire assert their sovereignty. This book focuses on the Komagata Maru episode of 1914: this Japanese ship was chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous Sikh businessman from Malaya. It carried 376 passengers from Punjab and was not permitted to land in Vancouver on grounds of a stipulation about a continuous journey from the port of departure. It was forced to return to Kolkata, where the passengers were fired at, imprisoned or kept under surveillance. The author isolates juridical procedures, tactics and apparatuses of security through which the British Empire exercised power on imperial subjects to investigate the significance of this incident to colonial and postcolonial migration. Juxtaposing public archives including newspapers, official documents and reports with private archives and interviews of descendants, the book analyses the legalities and machineries of surveillance that regulate the movements of people in the old and new Empire. Addressing contemporary discourse on neoimperialism and resistance, nation, migration, diaspora, multiculturalism and citizenship, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of diaspora studies, postcolonialism, minority studies, migration and mobility studies, multiculturalism and Sikh/Punjab and South Asian studies.

During the mass Jewish immigration of Eastern-European Jews to Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century, Yiddish publications offered a primary forum for a group of local writers to negotiate with their new identities as Canadian Jews. Within this wider process, Montreal writers H.M. Caiserman and B.G. Sack authored studies of Canadian literature in the early 1920s centred on Mohawk-English writer E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). What these essays show is that, despite the long-standing association of Canada’s Jewish population with the country’s dominant English culture, their status as “other” impelled leading members of the local Yiddish cultural milieu to seek out literary models among other historically marginalized groups. For Caiserman and Sack, Johnson’s Native heritage offered a model for resistance to assimilation into Canada’s dominant culture. In contrast, the advent of literature responding to the Nazi Holocaust by A.M. Klein and Eli Mandel, Native peoples became a symbol of loss and vanished landscapes.